The Garden of Africa, contemporary artist Rachid Koraïchi in 2021 opened, respectively, an exhibition and a cemetery.
The exhibition of sculpture, calligraphy and ceramics was shown in London, and the cemetery—owned, designed and built by Koraïchi—lies on the outskirts of the town of Zarzis, in southern Tunisia, along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Both exhibition and cemetery are characterized by migration, memory and mourning as well as empathy, dignity and peace.
The Garden of Africa opened on June 9, 2021, as a charitable burial ground, a creatively designed final resting place for some of the hundreds of refugees and migrants whose fates in the nearby waters have become known only when sea currents, which are particularly strong around Zarzis, have carried their bodies to the shore. The Garden of Africa is therefore “a place of remembrance, filled with fragrant plants that recall Paradise as described in the Qur’an,” says Koraïchi.
Attending the opening ceremony at the invitation of Tunisian President Kais Saied, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay afterward stated on Twitter that Koraïchi’s initiative “offers beauty to those who did not have a grave. His gesture testifies to our common humanity and says that everyone has the right to this dignity.” According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in 2020 more than 1,000 people drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe. Azoulay and Koraïchi were joined at the ceremony by representatives of the country’s three major historic faith traditions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism to emphasize the nonsectarian, humanitarian mission of the project. Azoulay also presented a bronze sculpture called The Tree of Peace.
The cemetery is set in an olive orchard, into which one enters this “paradise,” as Koraïchi calls it, through a gate painted brilliant yellow, representing the intensity of the African sun. The gate intentionally offers a low portal so that each visitor must stoop to pass through in a gesture of deference to those who took to sea in the hope of a brighter future that never came.
Two large alabaster stelae, which stand one on either side of the gate, serve as “symbolic, talismanic guardians of those who pray for the dead,” says Koraïchi, referring to the families and friends of those lost. The stelae replicate ones used by the artist’s family, whose lineage goes back to descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and who themselves migrated to North Africa via Kairouan, which they helped found in today’s Tunisia, some 350 kilometers north of Zarzis, and eventually settled farther west in Algeria.
From the gate, paths paved with antique ornamental tiles from Nabeul, the Tunisian town long famous for ceramic designs, line rows of burial plots. The paths are bordered by aromatic, therapeutic herbs such as algave, aloe vera and calendula, together with fragrant flowers such as jasmine, night-blooming cacti and red bougainvillea. Bitter oranges have been planted to symbolize both the hardship of death and the sweetness of the afterlife. Five olive trees have been designated to represent Islam’s five pillars, and similarly, 12 vines represent the 12 disciples of Jesus. The central path leads to a domed room dedicated to interfaith prayer and reflection.
The Garden of Africa has its origin in 2018, when Koraïchi’s daughter Aicha read on social media that Mediterranean currents had been washing an unusual number of bodies onto beaches around Zarzis, and that many were not receiving burials. Daughter and father visited Zarzis later that year, and what they found saddened them deeply. “I couldn’t stand the thought that people fleeing poverty, climate change, war and Covid were ending up in landfill. I wanted them to rest in an honorable place,” Koraïchi comments. In addition, the experience evoked the grievous personal loss of Koraïchi’s elder brother Mohammed, who in 1962 was swept to sea by a rip tide and never found.
Koraïchi took initiative as both a humanitarian and an artist. “I bought land there, a 2500-square-meter plot to turn into a cemetery: The Garden of Africa. It’s a huge task, which I’m funding myself, with no governmental help,” Koraïchi says. This has included not only planting, building and decorating, but also raising the ground level so that graves, when dug, would not reach the water table. For each refugee who is buried, the small staff at The Garden of Africa obtains and keeps a record of a DNA sample “in the hope that one day we may be able to identify them through DNA provided by relatives,” he explains. Building this haven and covering its operating expenses, including salaries for employees such as a live-in guardian and gravediggers, Koraïchi emphasizes, “is like offering a gift to a loved one. It’s not the price that matters. It is how much you want to offer the gift.”
Intrinsically linked to The Garden of Africa was Tears That Taste of the Sea, a four-part installation exhibition that opened in spring 2021 at October Gallery. The four installations, each in different media, echo aspects of the cemetery in both their emotionally powerful forms as well as their evocations of loss and compassion.
Three large, black openwork sculptures, made of corten steel, were lit so that their sparse, fluid shapes could throw delicate shadows onto the white walls: This is a device familiar to Koraïchi, who has played on the transience of shadows to evoke the ephemeral character of life that contrasts with the permanence and rigidity of the steel medium.
Of these sculptural forms, which reference both calligraphy and bodies in motion, Koraïchi, now 74, explains that his background, too, is one that mixes traditions as well as media: “My work is rooted in the Islamic tradition, but I studied art in the Western mode, and I was trained in metalwork, pottery, sculpture and painting.” As a result, his range of media has, over decades, stretched further to textiles, including paintings on silk, canvas and paper, and to work in wood, bronze and steel. “When I was born, Algeria was a department of France. My country has been colonized by different peoples over thousands of years—Phoenicians, Romans, Syrians and then the French.” But going further back, he adds, there are rock paintings in caves in the Sahara region of Tassili n’Ajjer that date from 5,000 BCE and earlier whose iconography, vibrancy and delicacy enchanted him.
The third element of the exhibition was a large etching, 108.5 by 76 centimeters. Koraïchi titled it “The Garden of Africa”—like the cemetery—because the etching offers a similar story: “Symbolically, the rectangular figures enclose real-world elements, while the circle at the center, representing infinity, reveals elements from another realm. The isolated figure caught in the center of the circle stands at a crossroads, suggesting a traveler who arrives at that place of destiny where this Earthly journey ends and another voyage begins.”
In early 2020, when Koraïchi exhibited in Pakistan as part of Lahore Biennale 02, he taught an etching workshop to students at the National College of Art, and he arranged for all the required materials to be sent to Lahore. He selected The Garden of Africa as the workshop’s theme to emphasize how different countries can be linked by a contemporary crisis, especially since some of the migrants whose journeys ended so tragically near Zarzis may have set out from Pakistan. In addition to his large work, on which students collaborated with him, he mentored some 70 student prints.
The fourth element of Tears That Taste of the Sea was a series of seven rectangular paintings on canvas, each on a rendition of a handkerchief, framed in black. “I was looking for something to accompany the lachrymatory vases that would extend the idea of a chronicle of intense emotions,” the artist explains. “Handkerchiefs imply softer, more pliant materials and implicate the powerful sense of smell. Today’s handkerchiefs have little value and are easily replaced by disposable tissues.” He indicates how in the past they were more symbolically significant, regarded for example among “love’s elaborate ruses,” which by absorbing traces of perfume, lipstick, perspiration as well as the salty residue of tears, they become palimpsests of intimate details in an individual’s life.
While The Garden of Africa may be his most ambitious project to date, it is not unusual for his works to take years to finish: His homage to the 13th-century mystical poets Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi, an installation titled Path of Roses, took from 1995 to 2005 to produce. In projects like this, he often combines materials and even at times collaborates with artisans in multiple places. For example, for his 2002 series Seven Variations of Indigo, he collaborated with Fadila Barrada, a Moroccan embroiderer, as well as expert Syrian linen artisans. The result was a series of silk-screened banners and squares on which inked wooden stamps—some antique and some carved by Koraïchi—were used to produce intricate patterns.
While The Garden of Africa may be his most ambitious project to date, it is not unusual for his works to take years to finish: His homage to the 13th-century mystical poets Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi, an installation titled Path of Roses, took from 1995 to 2005 to produce. In projects like this, he often combines materials and even at times collaborates with artisans in multiple places. For example, for his 2002 series Seven Variations of Indigo, he collaborated with Fadila Barrada, a Moroccan embroiderer, as well as expert Syrian linen artisans. The result was a series of silk-screened banners and squares on which inked wooden stamps—some antique and some carved by Koraïchi—were used to produce intricate patterns.
In 2011 Koraïchi’s selection of embroidered cloth banners from a series called The Invisible Masters won the internationally prestigious Jameel Prize for contemporary Islamic art. In his winning sequence, he used calligraphy, symbols and ciphers inspired by a range of scripts, languages and cultures to explore the lives and legacies of 14 great mystics of Islam. The Jameel Prize jury commended him for “how he had made his great spiritual and intellectual lineage accessible to all through the graphic language he had created out of his artistic heritage.”
October Gallery Director Chili Hawes adds her own accolade for Koraïchi’s “lifetime effort to convey, on the one hand, the historical developments of the broad world of Islam and, on the other, the expression of great beauty of the cycles of life from birth to death.”
With Tears That Taste of the Sea and The Garden of Africa, Koraïchi more than responds, more than inspires: He creates opportunities in which individuals, communities, organizations and governments can join him in cultivating a more empathetic future.
